


Black and White World

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Platonic Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 22:10:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11953689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: A variant of those soulmate AU fics where you see in black and white until you meet your soulmate, and then start seeing in color.Here, you start seeing colors when you love and are loved. Any kind of love.





	Black and White World

Rocket always assumed that he saw everything in black and white because he was the kind of creature he was, and for no other reason. He never knew any different until he'd been traveling with Groot for awhile and realized that he was seeing something else. He later learned it was called purple.

Years later he began to learn the names of other colors, but that one was always special. Purple was the color of learning you were a person, not an animal.

 

***

 

Orange was Meredith's color. It nearly vanished when she died, but it went away very slowly and it was never gone entirely, leaving Peter's world painted in shades of gray and rust.

Blue was so much like gray, and came so slowly, that he didn't even notice it for a very long time. It crept in around the edges, tiny hints of blue here and there, and when he finally began to notice, he thought he was imagining it. He'd grown up in a world touched with brilliant fire until his mother's death, and orange was the opposite of blue; so he thought it was a trick of his mind, impressing onto the world something that was so completely and in all ways _not_ orange that it looked like a color (but wasn't).

He painted the Milano orange and blue anyway.

Green came suddenly, bright and all at once, when he turned away from the Broker's door and saw a woman leaning against the wall, eating a piece of fruit. 

The rest of the spectrum trickled into his world one color at a time, and it wasn't until his first view of the newly rebuilt Milano that he realized he was seeing orange again, too, not muted and dull, but brilliant like a fire or the fluffy head of a troll doll.

The gift wrapping on the present from his mother had all the colors on it. He wondered if she'd known.

 

***

 

Groot always saw colors, all the colors, including ones that human eyes couldn't see in the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum. He didn't know other lifeforms were not the same.

 

***

 

Gamora lived in a world full of color until she was five Zen-Whoberi years old. And then there were no more colors ...

... none but one, a hint of blue, hoarded and held close to her heart throughout her childhood.

Many years later, when her black-and-white world filled up with color again, the only color it didn't have was blue. She didn't realize until the funeral that she was seeing blue again, all the many shades of blue that her sister wore on her skin.

 

***

 

Drax's skin was painted in his wife Hovat's color, red. After her death, the color vanished suddenly, leaving his skin gray as stone. _All_ the colors vanished, including those he'd grown up knowing, the colors for his parents and brother: the colors of the living and the dead, all at once. There were no more colors for him and never would be again.

What came back first was Hovat's color, bleeding slowly into his skin again. And then yellow; that had been his daughter's.

And then all the rest, slowing brightening his world until it was painted in all the shades he'd known on his homeworld and then some. He never knew which colors were whose, except for those first two, which would always and forever belong to only two people, and that was how he knew that, from beyond the curtain of death, they loved him still.

 

***

 

Yondu got all the colors at once, trickling in over a matter of days after Stakar shattered his Kree slave collar, filling his world with a million shades of colors he never even knew existed. Green like Aleta's leathers, orange like the Ravager flames, red like Krugarr's scales.

Fifteen years later, in a furious argument that forever broke his association with the Ravagers, the color seeped out of his world. Not all the way. But it turned down a once-colorful world to shades of sepia, only hinting at the brilliant colors that had once filled it.

It took him awhile -- years -- to notice the way red had seeped slowly back into his world: Ravager-leather red, red like Terran blood.

He wondered what color Peter saw, or if he saw any at all.

In the fight on Ego's planet, he never noticed -- not until the very end, when he held Peter's face in his hands and noticed that Peter's eyes were green, the spacesuit blue -- that he was seeing in color again. All the colors, every color of a rainbow Ravager funeral.

 

***

 

Colors flickered in and out of Mantis's world all the time. Every child was a new color. Everyone _they_ loved was a color (though muted all the same). Each one winked out and left her gray world a little more terribly gray.

She asked Ego about it, but he told her colors were a lie; there was no such thing. He had certainly never seen any such thing. So she tried to not to wonder about it anymore.

Color burst into her world in fireworks, every color she remembered from Ego's planet and more, filling her senses with a wave of love breaking over her.

She wondered if everyone else could see it, could feel it. She hoped they could.

 

***

 

Kraglin could. 

Had she asked him, he would have said he didn't expect to be able to. Since the mutiny, he'd only seen one color and that color was red (Yondu's color, the color of Ravager leathers and a flaming arrow). But in the blackness of space around the Quadrant, he saw all the colors of the beloved dead.

And that was what the Colors were for, of course. To show the dead they were still loved, and the living too.

 

***

 

Nebula only knew one color, only had ever known one color, and that color was green.

But where there was one color, there might be more.


End file.
